In January, 2005, I wrote a blog post ACT and Mac which is about the piece of Windows software (not the college entrance exam).
(For those who don’t know, ACT is a contact/calendar manager of the kind generally referred to as a “Personal Information Manager” or PIM. It is increasingly marketed towards people involved in sales, but its original emphasis was on relationships and that was what made it attractive to me at the time.)
My struggle was that I relied on ACT to pretty much manage my entire life for about 3-4 years, but I was now moving to Mac and there is no Mac version of ACT, nor do I expect that there will be.
I have never gotten so much response to anything I have written (well, except for the time that I upset The Cat People, but I don’t like to talk about that). Generally people ask: “So, what have you done? Did you find a good replacement for ACT?”
How much of an unhealthy devotion to ACT did I have?
Here is what I have done:
- Used ACT on a Windows desktop computer while also using a Mac laptop. This failed for the obvious reason of needing/wanting quick, easy, portable access to the most important app in my life. The reason that you get a laptop is that you want your computer with you in more than one place. Without your calendar/contact info, that’s a bit of a problem. I carried a Treo for a long time, but that was hardly the same.
- Carried a Windows laptop and a Mac laptop. In what can only be described as a raging fit of stupidity, I dropped several hundred dollars on a Dell Inspiron 700m. It was a nice enough computer (I really liked it, actually) but did you hear the part where I was carrying two laptops?!? Yeah, even a small and light second laptop will weigh you down. The good part was that I had instant access to my calendar, etc data wherever I was. The bad part was that it still didn’t integrate into my life as a Mac user. If I got an email on my Mac about a meeting, I’d have to fire up the Dell to make changes. This was stupid. Yet I did it for a year.
- Tried to use my Treo instead of Windows, syncing once a day to the Windows machine. A smart person might have tried this before buying a second laptop. I am not that person. On the other hand, it doesn’t really matter, since the Treo sucked and the ACT client for Palm really sucked. I wish I could find a more dignified way to put it, but let’s face facts, it sucked.
- Switched to Agendus on the Treo syncing to ACT on Windows. Yeah, the Treo still sucked, and Agendus routinely crashed, deleting any changes I had made since launching it. If you want to lose faith in a calendar program fast, try adding 6 new entries and have it crash, wiping out all 6, leaving you to wonder “What were the other 5?” Agendus sucked. If you’re a software developer for a calendar program that doesn’t immediately save its data as soon as possible after a new or modified entry, please either fix it or quit your job. Immediately.
- Ran Windows/ACT in VirtualPC on a PowerPC based Mac. About as much fun as shooting yourself in the groin six times with a nail gun and then sitting in a bath of rubbing alcohol.
- Sold the Dell 700m Bought an Intel MacBook as soon as they came out to run ACT/Windows in Boot Camp/Parallels/VMWare. This was the most promising of all of the solutions, and it worked thousands of times better than everything else, but by this point I was tired of the whole abusive relationship between myself and Windows and ACT. The company which owned ACT (which has been sold 2-3 times since I started using it) also stopped doing bug fixes, for the most part, opting instead to release annual upgrades at the cost of $129. That’s an upgrade cost, per year. They also dramatically changed the way that ACT worked somewhere around 2006, making use some separate database program, and it got really, really, really slower, and no better, and several long-standing bugs were not fixed.
Which Mac PIM apps have I tried?
In, under, and around each of these little experiments, I tried various Mac applications. I bought and tried which are two separate programs, one for calendar, one for contacts. They are supposed to work together but I never quite “got it” and clearly I was not alone, because they are working on a new program called “Nighthawk” which is currently in slow-moving-closed-beta stage (for example the as of 4/4/2008 says:
The calendar is expected to hit beta in early March. The year/month/week/multiday/day/detail views are all working but they need to be polished. We expect the calendar private beta to be a 3-4 month process.
Sounds promising, and I will definitely check it out, but as of right now it’s a bit of a dead parrot.
There’s also from Filemaker, which looks to have some of the customization features that ACT had. I have a license for Bento too, although I haven’t done much with it yet. However, if you were checking out making “The Switch” you should.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention which is the asthmatic, under-developed, skinny (on features) but somehow-still-bloated little brother to Microsoft Outlook. Part of Microsoft Office for Mac, Entourage is probably the best PIM client currently available for Mac today. The upside is that 90% of Mac switchers will buy Office:Mac anyway, so I’d encourage you to check that out.
But it ain’t no ACT.
So What Is The Equivalent of ACT on Mac?
The sad reality is that there is no equivalent of ACT on the Mac.
None.
Nothing even comes close to its power or flexibility.
Here is the single biggest thing I miss about ACT: Scheduling activities with certain people. In ACT, everything you schedule, you schedule with someone (even if it is yourself). Here’s an example: say I have a meeting with John Smith about landscaping on Wednesday at 3pm. In ACT I would schedule a new meeting (ctrl+M) and the box would come up asking me for time, date, duration, who it was with (my name being pre-selected), etc. You could choose names by starting to type in the Name field and have it auto-complete.
Then, in the calendar, it would show up as:
3:00 p.m. Landscaping [Smith, John]
I could then click on the entry and have it take me to John Smith’s information, which would contain a history of all my communications with John in the past. Also, if I needed to call John (say, to confirm the appointment or reschedule it), all of his contact information was right there.
If I scheduled a phone call (different than a to-do, different than a meeting) with John Smith, it would show up like this:
3:00 p.m. Landscaping [Smith, John 614-555-4537]
I could also tell ACT how long to default for meetings, to-dos, and phone calls, and have each of them be different. I could also customize alarm lead times for each. For example, I wanted to be reminded of meetings about 30 minutes beforehand, phone calls about 10 minutes beforehand, and To-Dos I usually let remind me at 0 minutes beforehand (not 1 minute before, as some programs make you do).
None of this is difficult, but none of the Mac PIMs make it easy to connect people with events. Even if you force iCal and Address Book to link a contact with an event, you can’t do anything with it, the connection doesn’t carry over to the iPhone, and it doesn’t show up in the list of events.
ACT would warn you if you tried to schedule two things at once. It would let you do it, if you insisted, and you could turn it off, but it was nice to have the computer do some of the work by saying “Are you sure you want to double-book yourself for lunch on Wednesday?”
ACT would let you schedule To Do items at a specific time and have them show up in the regular calendar. Add this to the conflict checking and it was easy enough to block off two hours on Tuesday morning and when I tried to schedule a meeting for that time, it would show the conflict. (You could set them for “no time” if you wanted to, but I always found that if I didn’t actually say when I was going to do something, it didn’t actually get done.
Ditto for Phone calls.
In the Mac world, only meetings get on the calendar (which David Allen would love, but doesn’t work for everyone).
There was also an option to show just Meetings, just To Dos, just phone calls, or any combination. They could easily be color coded too.
Now I can emulate this with using different calendars in iCal, but it’s Not The Same and it’s Not As Good.
What do you use on the Mac?
What you need to understand about PIM data on the Mac is that you will want to have it in Address Book and iCal. Mac OS X has something called “Sync Services” which basically lets a whole bunch of different apps communicate back and forth using your calendar, contact, etc information. Although it is far from perfect, unless you use one Mac and never ever ever want to share your information, your data will be in iCal and Address Book in some way, shape, or form.
Entourage, Bento and the other 3rd-party PIM apps can add some other information, but don’t expect them to sync well. For example, Entourage has a birthday field, and you can add a birthday field to Address Book, but they do not (last I checked) sync to each other. Your best bet? Look at what Address Book can do (you can add some additional fields to what it offers) and accept that as your limited set of actions.
iCal, compared to ACT, is a pathetic joke. But it’s what I use, because it’s the lingua franca of Mac calendar programs.
Migrating Data
I don’t remember how I moved my contact / calendar from ACT to Mac, but I do remember making lots of backups and printing stuff out before I started. Even if you print it to a PDF, don’t risk not having something later.
The best idea is to get ACT to export into a CSV (comma separate) or TSV (tab separated) file and then import contact data into Address Book on the Mac. I don’t remember the details of how or what I did, but I can tell you this: expect to lose everything except the basics: name, address, phone numbers, etc.
If anyone does have specifics, please let me know. Be glad to give credit.
(ps - please note that at no time in this article did I refer to ACT as being a tough act to follow. That was not unintentional, even though it would be an apt description of the situation, it’s just far too “Oh look how clever I am” which always makes me hate the Internet.)